Kanittha Kwanyu, 30, made headlines late last year when her debut film, Arpat, which tells the story of a young man forced into the monkhood, was banned following the release of its first trailer. A year later, the movie has been handpicked by the Federation of National Film Associations of Thailand to represent the organization at the 89th Academy Awards (Oscars) in Feb 2017.
I was fortunate to know leading Thai directors such as Prachya Pinkaew and Jira Malikul through studying film at university. Jira even turned my student film into a big-screen version with Best of Times (2009, GTH). After I had done plenty of work as an assistant director, Prachya, who works with Sahamonkhol films, said I should do a movie of my own and assigned me a ghost movie. I later stumbled on a plot from my junior who told me about the hungry ghosts known as pade in Isaan. He told me that he saw one as a naked woman, which people told him could mean she was experiencing bad karma for having sex with a monk while human.
How did you feel when it was banned?
I was really in shock. The opposition from people got stronger every day. We had already self-censored knowing that the religious content was a sensitive issue. I couldn’t do much. We couldn’t even tell the public what the movie was about. It finally got approval with an 18+ rating after we cleared up all the censorship board’s issues and changed the name from Arbat to Arpat [a less direct form of the same word, meaning to do wrong in the monkhood]. It’s truly an amazing journey from being banned to representing Thailand at the Oscars.
What did you learn from making the movie?
It made me realize how easily people judge something. You might see a clip of people being beaten and feel sorry for them. But who knows what went on before that. A three-minute clip is all it takes to form public opinion.
Monks are often in the news for doing wrong. How do you see the state of Buddhism in Thailand?
The more I researched the movie, the more I felt that we need to separate monks from the Buddha’s teachings. People are more scientific nowadays. We believe things because they’ve been proven correct by science, not by religion. But the Buddhism is a scientific religion. So I strongly believe that Buddhism is still the main source from which people can draw the answers they need in life.
What do you think of the movie industry in Thailand right now?
Thailand has a good variety of directors who want to create every genre of movie you can think of. But studios have learned that not all movies are successful. They block filmmakers from making the movies they want to, which drives directors to work hard at promoting their studio-backed projects while suppressing the work they really want to do. Audience should be more open-minded and watch more indie movies, then we would see more variety in the market as studios will invest more budget to independence movie.
